“We thank you for the gifts you brought,” Phuoc said. “You knew he liked that sort of champagne. I told him often it would be his downfall.” Phuoc looked into Christopher’s face and gave an explosive high-pitched laugh. “The burial is tomorrow-will you come?”
“Alas, I’ll be gone tomorrow. But my thoughts will be here.”
Christopher finished his rice wine. Phuoc handed him his own cup. “Drink it,” he said. “I have no use for it. Perhaps Tho told you I am a cu si-not quite a monk and, my brother always said, not quite a man. I observe the five interdictions of Buddha: no sex, no alcohol, no tobacco, no theft, no killing.”
“Yes, he spoke about you. I believe he admired you very much.”
“Did he? Tho lived without interdictions of any kind, except that he never betrayed a friend.”
“That I have known for a long time,” Christopher said.
“How much money did you bring?” Phuoc asked. It was a polite question among Vietnamese, who were always asking each other the details of their salaries and bank accounts.
“There are 175,000 piasters in the envelope.”
“Very generous. In dollars or piasters?”
“In piasters-it’s an odd sum, but it equals five thousand dollars.”
“Piasters will be less embarrassing,” Phuoc said. “It will be a great help to his widow. She must stay indoors for two years, as you know. She worries about the children-Tho insisted on expensive schools.”
“He was right in that, of course.”
“He was right in most things. He put money away, I believe more than a million piasters. My brother expected to die young, he often told me so. His was not the sort of life that lasts very long in a country as troubled as ours.”
“He lived his life with courage, at any rate.”
Phuoc laughed again, opening his eyes and his mouth wide and letting shrill notes escape from his throat; it was a mannerism of grief.
“For your friendship and your money, you should have something in return,” Phuoc said. “Come with me for a moment.”
He led Christopher down the hall and into his dead brother’s bedroom. Closing the door behind them, he went to the window and looked out, then leaned his back against the wall. Incense burned on the dresser in front of a photograph of Luong.
“My brother was going to meet you when he died,” Phuoc said. “Did you know that?”
“Yes. I found his body.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“That doesn’t happen,” Christopher said. “He died instantaneously-you saw his wound.”
“Can you tell me anything more about his death?”
“I saw the men who killed him. They walked past me as I entered the street where he lay. I did not, of course, know then what had happened.”
“Would you know them again?”
“I saw them again. They shot at me.” Christopher gave Luong’s brother a description of the two men. “Both times they were in Cholon. I’d look for them, if I were looking, around
Dong Khanh Boulevard. They’ll have money to spend, and that’s where they’d go to spend it.”
Phuoc absorbed the information. “Have you any idea what my brother wished to tell you?”
“No. I asked him to find a person named Lê Thu. Before he went out for the last time, he told me he had one more source to question-nothing more than that.”
“Then he went to his death for you?”
“Yes,” Christopher said.
Phuoc did not laugh again. “My brother always did as he wanted to do. It wasn’t your fault. He thought highly of you. As it happens, I know where he went.”
Christopher waited. When Phuoc did not speak again, he said, “Would your brother have wished you to tell me?”
“Oh, I think so,” Phuoc said. “You paid, after all. He went to see a Chinese named Yu Lung. You know the name? Yu Lung is a respected astrologer and geomancer. He knows the stars and all the rest very well-it’s a gift as well as a science. Very expensive. Yu Lung serves the famous in secret, he won’t deal with ordinary men.”
“Thank you. Where is Yu Lung’s house?”
“In Cholon, near the Tat Canal, by the racetrack. Ask anyone. Yu’s house is poor outside, rich inside-he’s a Chinese.”
Christopher rose, hesitated, held out his hand. Phuoc gripped it tightly and, holding it for a long moment, threw back his head and laughed again. “Luong-Tho should have asked Yu Lung about his own future, eh? Instead of asking questions for you, Craww-ford. Do you know what the Vietnamese name Tho means?”
“Longevity.”
“Yes, my brother will be dead for a long time,” Phuoc said. “Tho is also the word for a coffin that’s purchased well in advance of death. We thank you again for the money.”
5
Wolkowicz had given Christopher a car and a driver. “It’ll save us both trouble,” Wolkowicz said. “You don’t seem to care who knows where you go, and I can’t spare three men to sur-veille you until you get on the plane tonight.”
“Who’s the driver?”
“Pong’s his name. He’s a Thai, so he’s disinterested. He’ll take you where you want to go and wait outside-but don’t go off and leave him. I’m responsible to the cops until you get out of the country.”
The car was an air-conditioned Chevrolet with a two-way radio and local license tags. Pong was flicking dust from the waxed hood with a feather duster when Christopher emerged from Luong’s house. Under the tail of his long silk shirt, Pong wore a heavy revolver. One of Wolkowicz’s Swedish submachine guns was clipped under the dashboard, with three extra magazines stowed in polyethylene pouches tacked to the door. “Pong’s got a reputation around town,” Wolkowicz had said. “These people fear the Thais, and they couldn’t be more careful of old Pong if we painted shark’s teeth and a crazy eyeball on him, like a surplus B-26.”
Pong put his feather whisk in the trunk of the car and sat quietly with his hands on the steering wheel until Christopher told him where to go. Then he moved off, turning the car into traffic as a good dancer would swing a woman onto a ballroom floor. He was a competent man.
All during the morning, while he was looking at Luong in his coffin and talking to Phuoc, Christopher had controlled the impulse to touch the photograph the Truong toe had given him. Now he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and brought out the picture of Molly. He looked at his watch; he could not be in Rome in less than thirty-six hours. It was useless to send a telegram. Molly wasn’t trained, she wouldn’t know how to hide, she would think the cable was a joke. Christopher was not used to feeling emotion; he was as surprised by his fear for Molly as he had been by his love for her.
Pong maneuvered the clumsy car through traffic on the quais along the Ben Nghe Canal. Sampans lay in the foul water, their decks swarming with boatmen whose joints bulged on their thin bodies like knurs on diseased trees.
“Driving this car is like being in America,” Pong said, “so cool and quiet-I don’t like to get out.”
Christopher pressed the electric window control. The stench and noise of the canal and the heat of noon thrust through the open window like a beggar’s hand. Pong made a disgusted sound in his throat and stared at Christopher in the rear-view mirror. He turned north, toward the center of Cholon.
Yu Lung’s house was not far from the place where Christopher’s Citroen had exploded. The wreck had been hauled away, but broken glass still glittered on the pavement and the flames had left a long smudge across the face of a building. A soup vendor stood with his car where the Citroen had been, tapping on a block of wood with two sticks to attract customers.
They drove through the neighborhood twice before they found the house. Once, emerging from a sea of tin-roofed hovels, they found themselves across the city boundary, trapped on a narrow road through fields of paddy. Pong stepped on the accelerator and, reaching through the steering wheel, worked the action of the submachine gun to put a round in the chamber. He found a place to turn around by a group of huts; Pong pulled the wheel all the way over and skidded the tires in an arc through the dust. Christopher watched a young boy, astride a buffalo in a water hole, disappear in the cloud of dirt thrown upward by the wheels of the Chevrolet, and then come out the other side, not having moved while the slow wind moved the dust over him and the buffalo.